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Tuesday, 30 December 2014

Fiery Fiddler - James Dowdle

As he looked at the two hundred pounds of dignity,
standing six-feet high in the dock, His Honour felt uncomfortable. He was not
quite sure that the Canadian Chief of Police was a match for this' Hallelujah'
Colonel.

'The law makes and provides,' went the prosecution, ' that no person be allowed
to obstruct the highway, and any person or persons so doing, shall, at the
request of the police, thereat cease to do so or be taken into custody.'

'Obstructing the highway!' piped the police. man. 'That was what you were doing
with your preaching and fiddling. When ordered to desist, you insisted on
playing the constables to the police station. High sport for the crowd that
was, and not decent!’

‘Men’s sins are not decent,' thundered the Colonel, 'and you came obstructing
God in His work of cleansing the defiled.'

Chief Baines nudged His Honour. Ranting in Court was irregular.

'Let us pray for these two wrong-thinking officials', said the Colonel, turning
to his two companions in the dock with him; and promptly sank to his knees.

Such praying Chief Baines had never heard before. It astonished him; but when
he tried to get to the door the magistrate, who seemed almost petrified where
he sat, blocked the way of escape. He had to sit it out till, during a pause in
the prayer, he took his chance.

‘There, there,' said His Honour to the accused; 'gang awa!' Ye may march
unmolested on the side-walks if ye do so in single file. And ye may sing and ye
may play the drum a' ye like, only ye must just move on when the police tell
ye. Gang awa'! Gang awa'! '

It was enough! Marching out of Court, the vivacious Salvationist led his
comrades in singing:

Soldiers of faith, arise,
And put your armour on;
The opposing powers of darkness flee
Before the Rising Sun.

'That Colonel,' remarked the magistrate, 'is a great talker.'

'Yes,' replied Baines, 'he can out-talk the Devil. Neither you nor I stand the
ghost of a show with him.'

James Dowdle could pray anywhere. As a boy in an English village, he had prayed
when two ruffians had held him in front of a horse which they said would eat
him! Later, as a guard on the Great Western Railway, he had prayed at the
request of a fellow-worker who, seriously injured, was being taken to hospital.
But these had been but reedy warblings compared with the passionate outpourings
which were characteristic of him in later years.

And, also, this portly saint could play! He made his violin plead, then
triumph; made it woo and wassail as his fingers danced and his bow raced across
the strings.

In its early days, The Salvation Army had often to encounter physical as well
as spiritual opposition. Its unconventional marching, singing and playing in
the streets revolted the taste of those who preferred religion to be decorous,
and raised the ire of others whose sinful ways were interfered with. Gangs of
roughs, craving excitement, vented cruel passions on the Salvationists,
breaking up their Open-Air Meetings, attacking them with stones and other
missiles, or with their brutal fists battering those who sought only their
highest good. Hundreds of Salvationists, nearly half of them women and
children, were injured in a year.

Even where crowds were more friendly, hecklers disturbed the Open-Air Meetings,
and drunks would create unusual situations by joining in the proceedings.
Leaders had to be intrepid, ingenious, good humoured.

Dowdle - true to The Army's slogan: 'No retaliation for persecution'- in
open-air tussles with the roughs would take the pushing about (and there was a
lot of him to push) with a spontaneous gaiety. Always, however, he held his
fiddle high above his head, concerned lest it be hurt. He loved his fiddle.
With his instrument under one arm and flourishing his bow with the other, he
would harangue his hearers for ten minutes, then lead off into a gay song which
would set them singing merrily.

He had a way with crowds, and could always get one. Going along some main
street, this rollicking opportunist might set down his violin case at a
strategic point.

‘Stand back! Stand back!‘ he would roar, as if to keep off the gathering crowd
from the offending case, they in turn regarding him with mingled dismay and
expectation.

‘Stand back!' he would roar again. ‘It might go off!’ Then, when his
congregation had assembled, he would deftly extract his instrument.

‘Why, it's old Dowdle and his fiddle,' some would laugh, for his fame was
widely known; and the Meeting would begin.

His playing always brought glad ripples of laughter, and, even amid the squalor
of the slum , the message of liberty and peace. Once, after a disappointing
day, while waiting ten minutes for a train, he took out his fiddle and filled
the waiting room with merry music that produced smiles all round. Another time,
he was seen with two drunken women -one on each arm - while he played his
fiddle and led a street procession to the Salvation Army Hall.

A sprightly, mischievous boy, who ' loved a scrap,' James Dowdle had grown up
in a two roomed cottage in the. pretty village of Upton Lovell, Wiltshire,
where he was born on December 20, 1840. His parents had practised a simple,
loving piety. In the chapel they attended the preachers were fiery and
forthright; too hot for James, whose wild ways were rebuked by their scorching
words. Fleeing from the truth about himself, to the disappointment of his
parents he had left the chapel and, in order to salve his conscience by formal
attendance at a place of worship, joined the Church, where he played a bass
viol.

When he was twelve an uncle had undertaken to teach him the trade of a
wheelwright. But the work had not suited James - nor the religious discipline
of writing and reading passages from the Bible, set him by his uncle of an
evening. Three times he had run away, till finally he had been sent to a farm
near his home. But farm life was too slow; he had hied off to London as soon as
he could and secured a job in the goods yard of the Great Western Railway,
where he had rapidly risen to the position of guard.

Formal religion on Sundays did not square with loose living during the week.
Dowdle had 'cut' with the Church and given rein to his unruly passions-till his
evil way of life was challenged by the preaching of ?L man named Richard
Weaver. After weeks of misery, having listened to a converted actor conducting
a religious service in a music hall, Dowdle decided to 'surrender to God.' At
that moment he had found the peace of a forgiven past.

He had commenced fearlessly to tell his mates of his new experience, till one
day an older man said to him:

'Look here, James; I'm an old Christian and I don't get the persecution you
get. Keep your religion to yourself. Don't try to push it down other people's
throats.'

Dowdle, prevented by his long hours of work from attending a place of worship
on Sundays, had. found that in neglecting to talk about his experience of the
power of Christ he lost that power. Soon he was visiting public-houses again;
the old vicious habits returned.

Just at the time of this moral relapse Dowdle had been made a railway guard. In
the course of his duties he had often to walk on the open track. At Slough one
day, he was crossing the line to get some drink when fast-moving wagons caught
him, threw him, and would have mangled him had not a workmate snatched him from
death or serious injury.

Not long afterward, at Oxford, as he was talking to another guard, before
Dowdle's eyes the poor fellow had been killed beneath some passing freight. At
Reading he had two similar experiences., After the second, a Christian
pointsman had said to him:

'Jim, it's by God's mercy you were not killed. If you had been, what would have
become of you ?'

Startled by these incidents, a little while later, while listening to a band of
men preaching at Paddington Green, Dowdle had knelt on the stones and prayed
for God's forgiveness, arising with a wonderful feeling of gladness.

A blaspheming pointsman tested the genuineness of his change of heart when,
rebuked for his filthy language, he struck the convert a violent blow. James
laid down his lamp and doubled his fists as the blood rushed to his face. But
quietly he picked up his lamp again and walked away, coward though he might
seem.

'Didn't you kill him for it? ' asked a fellow guard who heard of the assault.

'No! I prayed God to save him,' was Dowdle's reply.

A few hours later, the pointsman was hurrying forward to beg Dowdle's pardon.

‘Certainly, I forgive you freely,' said Dowdle.

But it was only the grace of God that caused me to keep my hands off you.' The
hefty man had learned that meekness which Jesus declared should inherit the
earth.

The Paddington Green preachers were led by a builder named Stevens, who, soon
afterward, opened a mission hall. Dowdle was anxious to attend the opening
ceremony, but could not get leave from work even by paying for a substitute.
,So keen was he, however, that he sacrificed his job.

He became a baker's roundsman, but his employer, when he heard him' bawling
about the streets ' about religion, insisted that he could not allow it.

'But my open-air speaking is not done in your time,' Dowdle protested. When the
baker remained adamant, he again promptly forsook his job.

Dowdle then became the faithful workman of Mr. Stevens the builder, and a
preaching partner of Mr. Stevens the evangelist. After working hours, wherever
a job had taken them, they would tackle the low, drink-sodden, temper-ridden
desperadoes of the neighbourhood, sometimes having a far from friendly
reception.

One morning Dowdle was roused at four o'clock to face the key man of a gang of
roughs who often attacked Stevens' meetings. The man was carrying a rope,
determined to make an end of the awful life he had been living, either by
suicide or by Salvation. Dowdle was soon up and pointing the man to the
Saviour.. Working among such as these, he was being prepared for a wider
ministry.

The 'Eastern Star' was a notorious public house in Whitechapel. One day Mr.
Stevens was asked to call there and discuss certain alterations with a Rev.
William Booth. The place was to become the Headquarters of 'The Christian
Mission,' of which Booth was the General Superintendent.

Dowdle, who accompanied his employer, was greatly interested in the tall
evangelist with his piercing eyes, his hooked nose and black beard. What he
heard of his work in the East End thrilled him, for Mr. Booth's Meetings were
evidently crowded with the most vicious and degraded men and women, many of
whom were being converted and joining in the crusade of the unusual minister.

Dowdle was invited to special Meetings at a theatre on the following Sunday. In
an Open Air Meeting preceding a march, he heard William Booth preach and
himself was asked to speak. Before long he was one of this remarkable man's
most enthusiastic followers. They became warmly attached to each other.

William Booth conducted the marriage of Mr. Dowdle and Miss Stevens, daughter
of the bridegroom's former employer. The couple took charge of a shop in
Shoreditch where they served cheap dinners to the poor on weekdays and, in a
former music-hall behind the shop, led evangelistic Meetings on Sundays.

That shop warmed bodies and souls. Behind the counter Dowdle kept a Bible to
feed those in need spiritually; his success was seen in scores of people who
gave up their evil and selfish life and began to serve God. True, the
combination of puddings and prayers shocked some folk who, reflecting the
spirit of the age, did not include a social conscience in their religious
convictions. Hard to reconcile Dowdle with the starched shirt and immaculate
black suit and tie of the respectable preachers of the period!

A visitor to the soup shop would see him - expansive, his face beaming through
a cloud of steam rising from cauldrons of soup, potatoes and meat; a large
white apron covering his huge figure, and his sleeves rolled to the elbows as
he flourished fork and ladle. And many a man whose family was starving was
helped.

Before long, the Dowdles were needed in the provinces, first at Chatham, where
Mrs. Booth, the gifted wife of the mission leader, had been preaching With
great effect. Later still, they took charge of Mission Stations at Stockton,
Leeds and Plymouth. In these centres and many neighbouring places, Dowdle made
a deep. impression. Always his methods were spectacular, though never bizarre.
Novelty served to capture the people's interest, but he was seeking their
Salvation, not personal notoriety. All the same, he was often quixotic.

'What are you propping that place up for, man' he shouted one day to a man
leaning against a public-house. ' Come away and let the Devil prop up his own
house.'

Early in his Christian life his future wife had asked Dowdle to sign the
abstinence pledge. He had countered by remarking that the small amount of
liquor he took wouldn't make any difference to him.

'Then,' wise Miss Stevens had said, 'it won't be difficult for you to give it
up.' That had settled matters. In any case he saw only too much of the evil
consequences of drink, and it was but natural that he should say strong things
against the cause of such misery. He saw that he must give up the temperate use
of what, taken in excess, was ruining so many around him.

In Dowdle's denunciation of the evil there was nothing mealy mouthed; nor was
his temperance teaching fired, artillery-like, from a distance. Dowdle was
never afraid of hand to hand encounter. At times his mode of expression was
extreme, but then he had seen the extreme and often terrible results of
drunkenness.

'Hallo!' he exclaimed to a barman of a public house he passed one day. ' What
are you doing ?

‘Cleaning the windows,' came the reply.

'You can't do it,' said Dowdle.

'Can't do it! What do you mean ' The barman was secretly irritated.

'Mean?' said Dowdle. 'I mean that those windows are stained with the blood of
souls, and nobody can get that stain off.'

Yet few ever took offence at what he said, for with his strong convictions went
a manner so brisk and a spirit so amiable that he was dubbed a good sort.'

'Oh, hinney,' the Geordies of Tyneside would remark, ' there's neebody like
Doodle.' Around Middlesbrough, the Salvationists were called 'Sally Doodles';
he was so widely known.

By this time Dowdle had been entrusted with the oversight of a large area, with
a number of Salvation Army Corps - for in 1878 The Christian Mission had become
The Salvation Army - under his command. His boisterous personality still pushed
its way into the affairs of men wherever he went. With his office-boy, he was
walking along a street one day when they came upon a wagoner smoking.

‘Look here, Willie,' said Dowdle, ' here's a man this beautiful day smoking.
He's got Hell inside, and he must have a bit of fire outside, too.'

The man, aroused, said that he was just having a quiet smoke to cool himself.
Major Dowdle, as he now was, let him have it hot about his spiritual welfare,
but all in so friendly a manner that the man was not offended. Always he was
anxious to help the people whose habits he might condemn. Even those out to
disturb him were prevented by his good-natured courage. He and his Converts
were kneeling in the street on one occasion, praying, when half-drunken men
threw water over them and then, breaking into the ring of Salvationists, rolled
over Dowdle. He, however, continued praying. In the Hall later, one of the
roughs, with tears in his eyes, asked to address the Meeting. Confessing that
he had been in the wrong, he asked all to pray for him, which, of course,
Dowdle was glad to do.

At Sunderland, a man dressed like a clown rode a pony into the middle of an
Open-Air Meeting. The imperturbable Dowdle quietly took hold of the pony's head
and continued the Meeting. Afterward, the mounted man was led at the head of
the march, right through the doors and up to the front of the Victoria Hall.
The ' clown' at first brazenly faced it out, but this was no ordinary Meeting.
The diversion of a comic on a pony wag soon forgotten by the great audience.
The fancy dressed man, spiritually unseated, slid off his pony to the Penitent
Form. He could not fool Christ. The foolishness of God is wiser than men.'

The same discovery was made by a landlord who, from the door of his
public-house, offered Dowdle a large pot of beer. As if intending to enjoy it,
the Major accepted it, and walked into the house. There he set the beer on the
counter and talked to the landlord and the men about their souls.

'Now, men, we'll pray,' said he, and, kneeling on the sawdust-covered floor, he
talked to God for them all. Finished, he stalked out of the public house and
emptied the beer into the gutter.

Dowdle's friendliness together with his passionate exhortations did much to
build up the ' Division' he commanded-all Salvation Army work north of
Scarborough and Lancaster. By the time he left this work two and a half years
later, the number of Corps had been more than trebled. He was constantly
visiting his Officers, conducting Meetings for them, championing their cause,
encouraging, reproving, suggesting anything and everything to help them.
Sometimes Mrs. Dowdle accompanied him, at other times they traveled to separate
fields of labour.

A Leeds clergyman, who disagreed with many Salvation Army methods, yet had to
say that he had never known a man who did not show self in connection with his
work except Dowdle.

Extremely powerful, too, were his Meetings. Besides his colloquial preaching,
Dowdle's vocal ducts with his wife always made a great appeal. The two looked a
strange contrast - he, huge and dominating; she, rather frail and winsome-but
their spirit and manner gave a picture of happy confidence in each other and in
God.

Mrs. Dowdle often followed up their duets with simple, homely words which the
crowd, hushed by the singing, was ready to receive. Quietly the seekers would
come forward. Love unadulterated, all - inclusive was the secret of these two
who, lacking many earthly gifts, held the heavenly key that unlocked the hearts
of others. Hence they were chosen of God for their task.

This is His will, He takes and He refuses,
Finds Him ambassadors whom men deny;
Wise ones nor mighty for His saints He chooses
No such as John, or Gideon, or I.

At Leeds, where a circus had been hired for the Meetings, a low barrier
prevented people from coming into the ring-where a platform and Penitent Form
had been erected-to declare their decision to follow Christ. But no obstacle
stayed the power of those gatherings. Dowdle asked those who wished to seek God
to put up their hands, and then provided chairs so that they could climb over
the balustrade. Hundreds made the climb.

‘Are you going to Pullan's?' was
on everybody's lips during his stay in Bradford. Pullan's was a large theatre
he was using on Sundays for his Meetings, and the roads leading to it were
thronged as people streamed to hear him. Hundreds experienced a change of heart
in Pullan's Theatre.

One man, named Saunders, soon afterward migrated to Australia. Attending a
mission meeting in Adelaide, he met another Christian Mission Convert, Gore by
name. Together they began to hold Meetings in the land of their adoption, and
so successful was their work that soon they petitioned William Booth to send
Officers to take charge, ' as quick as fire and steam could bring them.' From
that beginning the work has increased until to-day there are in the
Commonwealth over 2,000 Officers, working at some 1,400 evangelistic and social
centres. Such is God's multiplication table.

One drizzling night, wearing oilskins, Dowdle strode through Westgate in
Bradford, handing out handbills with announcements of his Meetings. Leaning
against a lamp-post he saw a disconsolate lad of seventeen. As he gave him a
bill, he paused to say 'God bless you!' and to tell him that on the following
night, in Pullan's Theatre, devils would be cast out of men by the power of
God's Spirit. It was Dowdle's way of saying that many were to find that their
evil passions, now in control, would come under the rule of God, and they could
thus find peace of heart.

The youth was John Lawley, an engine-cleaner in a local mill. That night,
through a misunderstanding, he had parted company with his best friend. In his
loneliness he was glad to read, by the light of the lamp, the handbill
confirming Dowdle's invitation to the Meeting. He accepted it and, as a result,
later made a public confession that he would follow Christ.

Far greater than a man's single
endeavour in the service of God is the multiplied witness of his Converts. John
Lawley became an outstanding Salvation Army Officer who commanded important
centres of work and, later, traveled far and wide with William Booth. Vast
congregations in many parts of the world were deeply moved by his singing of
Gospel songs, many of which he himself composed. Following the General's
addresses, he conducted the Prayer Meetings, in which multitudes were persuaded
to accept Christ's forgive new of sins.

Before Lawley set out as a world-traveler, however, Dowdle himself was to
journey to other countries. For ten years he campaigned in New Zealand, the
United States of America, Canada, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Germany and
elsewhere, in his robust manner appealing to all sorts and conditions of men to
seek the Saviour.

From country after country, as well as from many parts of the homeland, news
was flashed to Headquarters in London of hundreds of ' prisoners taken '-the
expressive term of those days for Converts won from the bondage of sin and
captured for Christ.

With his usual tireless labour, Dowdle crowded his days. In one year, in
Australia - the long distances less easy to cover in the eighties and nineties
than nowadays - Dowdle traveled 23,500 miles, visited 160 centres and conducted
1,200 Meetings, in which more than 6,500 persons decided to serve God.

The popularity he enjoyed wherever he went did not spoil his zeal. His Meetings
remained typical of him-his rough candour, merry asides, soulful singing and
intense earnestness in endeavouring to ' seek and save that which was lost.' He
spent himself for souls.

In 1896, Dowdle returned to London broken in health. Coming out of a specialist's
consulting room in Melbourne, he had confided to Mrs. Dowdle, with a calm voice
that proved his absolute trust in the God he served:

'They say it's heart disease. God's will be done.'

On arrival in London he was taken to a little house in Clapton where he spent
the remaining years of his life. The cabby who drove him helped him into the
house. Once in the passage Dowdle helped the cabby to find Christ. Physical
weakness did not diminish his desire to win men for his Master.

For his few remaining years his work was limited, yet he wielded a quiet and
powerful influence among his colleagues on Headquarters. In his magnanimous
spirit there was no heart disease.

Dowdle's old leader and friend, General William Booth, conducted the funeral of
his faithful Commissioner. On the coffin, draped with the Salvation Army Flag,
lay Dowdle's cap and fiddle. Great and respectful crowds gathered for what a
working man described as a funeral ' worthy of a duke'.

On the following Sunday nearly 200 persons sought Christ in the Memorial
Meeting in the famous Clapton Congress Hall. Amongst them were several women of
the streets who were taken from the Hall direct to The Salvation Army's
Receiving Home. The Meeting was worthy of a soul-winner.